Beverage dispensing units have become a popular way for food and beverage establishments to create on-site fountain beverages. These beverage dispensing units are used to dispense frozen specialty beverages such as shakes, smoothies, and other frozen style drinks.
Conventional frozen beverage dispensers typically have a separate manifold and dispensing system for each different frozen beverage. If a consumer orders a beverage which contains more than one different frozen beverage, the operator would dispense each product separately from that frozen product's dispensing system. In addition, if the ordered beverage includes a solid add-in product such as a fruit, it would be added by a different apparatus or scooped manually into the frozen beverage.
Creation of a beverage that contains multiple frozen products along with additional dry add-in products is labor intensive. Also, as the number of ingredient offerings increases, the number of different final product combinations also increases exponentially. Creating so many different frozen product beverage combinations becomes very operator training and labor intensive. Furthermore, the nature of preparing a beverage that contains at least two frozen products leads to final product inconsistentency as manual preparation of such beverages is heavily dependent upon operator preferences.
Therefore, there is a need for a frozen beverage dispensing system that dispenses consistent frozen beverages that include at least two frozen ingredients, automatically dispenses an array of solid products into the beverage, when required, and reduces operator training and labor costs.